15043

WiSe 22/23: Law, Race and Imagination

Nerges Azizi Anna Rahel Fischer

Kommentar

In this seminar, we will think about the entanglement of law, race and imagination, with a particular sensibility to border violence. The debates surrounding each of these topics have largely been engaged by way of critique, deconstructing the way contemporary political forms and orders establish, naturalize and maintain inequality and injustice. In this course we will certainly engage with critique, but we will also challenge ourselves to re-imagine the meaning of these concepts in relation to matters of liberation, freedom and alternative ways of relating to one another. We start from the recognition that law, although often seen as a means of countering violence and injustice, regularly constitutes the very site where various forms of violence and injustice are (co-)produced and justified. Race historically shapes the power of law in determining which subjects should be recognized as persons or as entities with the capacity to bear rights and responsibilities. This very intersection of race and law is pivotal in regulating who can move across space and transgress borders, and in distributing resources and thereby chances of survival. Bearing this in mind, we ask: how does law become co-constitutive of processes of racialization? What is the entanglement between law and racial capitalism? What narratives around violence and resistance are fostered in the legal sphere and what horizons of possibility are staked out? And what transformative possibilities are offered by imagination, critical fabulation, and thinking beyond the law while acknowledging its overarching sway? We will begin the course by collaboratively developing key concepts and analytical tools, and then consider the role of border contexts, racial capitalism, temporality, phenomenology and affect in relation to this entanglement of law, race and imagination. Key theorists we will engage with are Frantz Fanon, Stuart Hall, Saidiya Hartman and Christina Sharpe. The course has five central aims: (1) to develop a critical understanding of the entanglement between law and race in the context of border violence, (2) to analyze concrete manifestations of this entanglement of law and race in a wide range of historical and contemporary cases, including court decisions of the European Court of Human Rights, and in the context of a global architecture and processes of racial capitalism; (3) to attempt to think about what can be imagined beyond the law, that is, beyond the limitation of what can be registered in the legal archive, in order to construct speculative futures; (4) to develop skills of close reading, critical thinking, analytical writing, and independent research. Seminar Participation: The seminars will mainly consist of discussions in which students are encouraged to actively participate. We will assign a range of materials, such as academic texts, film material, legal cases and artworks. Many of the readings will be full chapters or complete short pieces, while other readings will be short excerpts. In order to adequately prepare for seminars, students are expected to come to class having studied the assignments, prepared questions and thought of issues that they would like to discuss. Schließen